Sunday, July 31, 2005

Blinklist

Now that I am out from under some of the pressure of graduate course work, I have spent much of the weekend fiddling around with some things: reading, playing with some new ‘stuff’ and learning more about a new social bookmarking tool called blinklist. Even though it is still in the ‘beta’ stage, the concepts behind this are pretty incredible and I’m sure will become prominent in the near future.

First off, ditch your del.icio.us list and migrate to blinklist. Why? It’s tagging system makes more sense, the interface is more intuitive, and it just looks better.

I started out with a personal list to which I uploaded my local bookmarks. That turned out to be somewhat of a mess because the tags it used really didn’t make sense. That’s a minor point though, and something I’m sure they’ll be working out. I then created another list that I’m going to keep all technology related articles and sites on. I then started visiting my bookmarks one by one, putting them into blinklist.

At first I thought this would be tedious, but it is proving to be very valuable. Not only have I visited some really neat stuff I bookmarked but really never had the time to do anything about, much of what I am going to is leading me into new areas and new sites. The really nice part of blinklist is that the bookmarks are now public. So I can share them with people at school, the tech committee, even on this blog (which I intend getting to shortly).

I plan on spending August slowly going through my bookmarks and making sense of them. The power of the tags is that it draws relationships between links. I can’t wait to actually experience the power of the tool.

Here is how some people are using blinklist. And here is a review of the service in light of its potential for educators.

I hope to get enough experience with it this month so that I can encourage teachers and students to experience this new (or relatively new) technology.

Posted by Randy on 07/31 at 09:43 PM
Web • Emerging Technologies • (3) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
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